to speak with emira woods, a co-director of foreign policy in focus at the institute for policy studies. welcome to "democracy now!" let's start off with the hostage situation in algeria. what do you understand at this point? >> first, i think we have to extend condolences to those families of those to a lost life. situation is fluid. hostages reportedly have been taken coming from at least eight different countries, including britain, japan, ireland. there are still reports that not only those that have been killed coming potentially from britain, france, japan and other countries, but also this is a crisis that is still under way. the algerian military is still seeing this as an ongoing incident. the information is scant t and fluid, changing very rapidly. it is coming out very slowly because of -- remember, algeria is essentially a military state. information is not flowing freely. there is a reluctance to share information with international actors, particularly former colonial powers, given the history of what has happened in algeria. >> the reports are coming out initially saying